After almost three years of legislative negotiating the Agricultural Act of 2014, or Farm Bill, has come home. The Michigan Farm Bureau has projected its costs to be $489 billion over the next four years. But how this creation of Congress will play out in America is as questionable as Michigan’s corn crop.

“A lot of people think farmers are getting rich from the farm bill,” says Cecil Schoenherr of Ray Township and board member for the Macomb County Farm Bureau. “People see that huge number and right away they think we’re getting all this money. But it’s 80 percent food programs, school lunches and food stamps. Things like that, they tie them together so they can get it passed.”

“One guy told me, ‘I’m going to go and farm 10 acres so I can cash in on the farm bill,’” says Cecil’s son, Steve, who owns a farm around the corner from his dad.

Advertisement

“We’re getting enough to keep the shirt on our back,” Cecil says.

It was farmers like Cecil and Steve who agreed to major reforms to the farm bill, including the elimination of direct payments, which were paid every year whether they were needed. Instead, farmers will gain access to better crop insurance and the option of two programs, including Agricultural Risk Coverage or the Price Loss Coverage.

ARC covers losses at either the individual farm level or at the county-level. PLC provides payments when the price of a crop drops below a reference price. The problem is farmers have to make a one-time irrevocable decision to enroll in ARC or PLC and both are extremely complex.

“We’re still, trying to figure out how the programs will work,” Cecil says.

Produce farmer Ken DeCock of Macomb Township has decided not to participate in the farm bill programs. He was excited to hear that the new farm bill makes crop insurance available to specialty crop growers. After all, Michigan’s cherry growers and tomato farmers face the same risks as commodity farmers but it’s costly and time-consuming to submit an insurance claim.

“For me to keep track of bushels of products sold through the stand would require a register costing over $25,000 and not just one register,” DeCock says. “(Plus) crop insurance pays differently on types of tomatoes (regular, roma, cherry, grape), peppers (regular, sweet banana, hot banana, jalapeno, cabana, etc.). So I would have to keep track of each variety individually.

“The system in Michigan is not set up to expedite small, multi-variety fruit and vegetable farms.”

So, unlike Michigan’s cherry farmers, who were hit hard by freezes and other bad weather and are likely to take advantage of the crop insurance program, DeCock will not.

What will help him and other fruit and vegetable growers are the federal block grants for specialty crops.

“The grants will help growers sell their produce, protect crops from pests and improve production practices,” says U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, farm bill author and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

As for Michigan’s dairy farmers? Michigan Milk Producers Association president and St. John dairy farmer Ken Nobis says what they gained with the new farm bill is a safety net in case the economy flatlines again, as it did in 2009.

At the time, feed costs escalated while milk prices dropped, resulting in the farmer paying more than $10 per hundred pounds to feed the cow, while milk prices dipped below $2. The farm bill’s new margin protection program mandates if milk prices go below $4 the USDA will buy dairy products and distribute them to area food banks, shelters and low-income food programs.

“What this is, is a food and farm bill,” says Stabenow, who started working on the bill in 2011. “It’s all about supporting the food system, from the farmers who are growing it to the consumers who are putting it on the table.”

One program in particular had SNAP representatives in Mexico handing out glossy brochures on how to collect food stamps in the U.S.

“That was eliminated,” Miller says. The bill also prevents lottery winners from receiving food assistance and stops college students from misusing benefits. “I think I’m a very compassionate person and for someone who has fallen on hard times, of course they should get assistance,” Miller says.

Among the agencies that will benefit from the bill’s nutrition programs is Gleaners Food Bank. Last year, Gleaners partnered with 562 other agencies in order to distribute 95,241 meals, amounting to 41,601,477 pounds of food for Michigan families.

The new farm bill also increases food assistance and expands access to local, tribal, Kosher and Halal foods in assistance programs.

Ann Shank of Ferndale, a Gleaners vice president, says she just learned about this provision.

“It’s important to give people food that they will eat,” Shank says. Now nonprofit organizations like Yad Ezra in Berkley -- which might take Kosher food from its shelves to help out other Michigan food banks will have more food for their own needy populations.

“Honestly, it’s a big, huge, complex bill,” Shank says of the legislation. Those who help low-income families are still sorting out how the new programs and reforms will impact their clients. “But I think it was really a tremendous job that legislators did on both sides. From the perspective of hungry families, it could’ve been a lot worse.”